The Wounded World Awakens

The Wounded World Awakens

The day the music stopped, the world held its breath.

For six long years, the skies had thundered with the roar of airplanes. The seas had churned with the motors of warships. The ground had shaken beneath the feet of soldiers marching across fields that had once been peaceful farms and quiet villages. Now, on a warm August morning in 1945, all of that came to an end.

It began in a small town in Missouri. The whole world was watching—through radios crackling in living rooms, through newspapers being printed in every language, through the whispered words of people gathered on street corners. In a small brick schoolhouse, a piano sat silent. And then, on August 14, 1945, someone sat down and began to play.

"Peace!" someone shouted. And the word spread like wildfire across a nation that had been holding its breath for four years. Strangers hugged each other in the streets. Church bells rang from coast to coast. People danced in Times Square, in Trafalgar Square, in the streets of Moscow and Shanghai and Cairo. The longest, bloodiest war in human history—World War II—had finally, mercifully, ended.

But as the celebrations continued through that night and into the following days, something else was happening. Something that most people couldn't see, but that would change everything. In laboratories in the American desert, in the marble halls of great palaces in Europe, in the bombed-out streets of cities that no longer existed, a new kind of story was beginning. A story about two giants who would soon wake up and discover they could no longer be friends.

This is that story. This is the story of the Cold War—the greatest game ever played, a game that split the world in half and lasted for nearly fifty years. And it all started in 1945, on the very day that the guns finally fell silent.

Let us begin where all great stories begin: with a world in pieces, and the people brave enough—or perhaps foolish enough—to try to put it back together.

A World in Ruins

Imagine, for a moment, that you could climb aboard a magic carpet and fly over the world as it looked in the summer of 1945. What would you see?

First, you would see Europe—a continent that had been turned into a battlefield not once but twice in less than thirty years. The cities you flew over would have no roofs. Their streets would be piles of broken stone where buildings once stood. Warsaw, the capital of Poland, was ninety percent destroyed. Dresden, a beautiful city in Germany famous for its art and music, had been burned to the ground. Berlin, the heart of the German war machine, was nothing but rubble. Scientists who visited afterward said they had never seen anything like it—not even the Moon had so many craters.

In the Pacific Ocean, you would see a different kind of destruction. Islands that had been covered in palm trees and colorful birds now wore the scars of war. Where lush jungles once grew, there were only stumps and burnt earth. The island of Iwo Jima, where American soldiers had fought and died in one of the bloodiest battles of the war, was so small you could walk across it in an hour. But it had been bombed so many times that it looked like a place on the Moon—gray and lifeless and strange.

And the people. Oh, the people. If your magic carpet could carry you down into the streets, you would see them wandering like ghosts through the ruins of their former lives. There were millions of them—refugees, they were called. People who had fled from one place to another, always running from danger, always hoping to find safety somewhere that didn't exist.

In Germany alone, there were more than ten million people who had been forced to leave their homes. They walked along roadsides with everything they owned packed into small bundles. Old grandmothers who could barely walk. Children with no parents to hold their hands. Soldiers who had survived the fighting but had nowhere to go home to, because home no longer existed.

In Poland, the number was even higher. The country had been invaded first by Germany, then by the Soviet Union. By the time the war ended, more than six million Poles had been killed—about one in five people who had lived there before the war. Entire families had been wiped out. Towns had been emptied. The Jewish population of Poland, which had numbered in the millions, was almost entirely gone, murdered in the terrible camps that the Nazis had built across occupied Europe.

And this was only the beginning of the counting. The numbers were so large that they stopped making sense. Sixteen million Soviet soldiers and civilians dead. Twenty million Chinese dead. Millions more in Japan, in France, in Britain, in the United States, in every corner of the globe. In total, historians now believe that between fifty and eighty million people died in World War II. More people than lived in all of Canada. More people than lived in all of Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa combined. A catastrophe so vast that it seemed like the world itself was wounded and bleeding.

But the wounds weren't only visible. They were hidden, too—in the hearts and minds of people who had survived things no human being should ever have to survive. Men who had seen their best friends die in the mud. Women who had watched their children starve. Children who had grown up knowing nothing but bombing raids and blackouts, who had learned to run before they learned to read. They carried these wounds everywhere, invisible scars that would never fully heal.

This was the world that the war had left behind. A world that looked, from above, like someone had taken a giant hammer and smashed everything into pieces. And now came the question that would define the rest of the century: Who would help put the pieces back together?

The Three Great Men

In the ruins of the old world, three men stood ready to shape the new one.

The first was a short, stern man with round spectacles and a thick mustache. He spoke rarely in public, but when he did, his words carried the weight of an entire nation. This was Joseph Stalin, the leader of the Soviet Union—the vast country that stretched across the northern part of Europe and all of northern Asia. Stalin had a face like a potato—his enemies said so, though never where he could hear. He had a soft Georgian accent that didn't match his hard reputation. He had risen to power through a combination of cunning, brutality, and genuine political skill, defeating his rivals in the Soviet Communist Party one by one until he stood alone at the top.

Stalin was a man who trusted no one. He had seen too many plots, too many betrayals, to ever relax his guard. His own paranoia would eventually lead him to kill millions of his own people—farmers who refused to give up their land, army officers who might have challenged his rule, writers and artists who dared to think differently. But in 1945, many people outside the Soviet Union still believed he was just a strong leader doing what was necessary to protect his country from its enemies.

The second man was tall and handsome, with the kind of broad smile that made people feel like everything would be all right. He had been a businessman and a sailor before he became a politician, and he still carried himself with the easy confidence of someone who had faced danger and come through it. This was Harry Truman, the President of the United States. He had only been in the job for a few months when the war ended—before that, he had been a senator from Missouri, a man no one had paid much attention to. But when Franklin Roosevelt, the greatest American president of the twentieth century, died in April 1945, Truman suddenly found himself holding the most powerful job in the world.

Truman was a man who believed in action. He didn't like to wait around and think too long about things. When he made a decision, he made it quickly and stuck to it, no matter what anyone else said. This would serve him well in the ye